On the Internet, social networks allow users to connect to and share information with each other. Many social networks include a content sharing aspect that allows users to upload, view, and share content, such as video content, image content, audio content, and so on. Other users of the social network may comment on the shared content, discover new content, locate updates, share content, and otherwise interact with the provided content. The shared content may include content from professional content creators, e.g., movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as content from amateur content creators, e.g., video blogging and short original videos.
Currently, when a user is viewing a content item of the content sharing platform, the user may comment on the content item. Writing comments corresponding to a content item is the primary way for users to communicate back to the creator of the content item. Comments also allow users to communicate with each other around a specific topic (e.g., such as the content item in question). When there are hundreds or thousands of comments, it becomes very difficult to find good or relevant comments.
There are many existing approaches to sorting, ranking, and showing the comments that are relevant to a user. For example, individual comments can have “up” and “down” buttons to allow users to vote on other user's comments in order to show the most “up”-voted comments at the top of a comments section. Another technique is to show the comments from people in a user's social network at the top. One other common approach is to display the comments from highly-reputable users at the top of the comments section. Reputation may be acquired based on tenure, the number of “up” votes, the number of comments, votes given by other users, and a wide variety of other factors.